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The Politics of Urban Agriculture: Sustainability, Governance, and Contestation

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The Politics of Urban Agriculture: Sustainability, Governance, and Contestation Forthcoming chapter in A. Jonas, B. Miller, K. Ward, and D. Wilson (eds) SAGE Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics (SAGE Publications) The politics of urban agriculture: Sustainability, governance, and contestation Nathan McClintock a Christiana Miewald b Eugene McCann c Introduction The Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House (DTES NH) is a community services centre in a low-income neighbourhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. Like many organizations of its type, its programs are based on a set of principles – an ‘operating philosophy’ – of inclusivity and activism. Unlike most, the neighbourhood house also articulates a separate, if related, ‘food philosophy:’ Food is a key determinant of individual and community health – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. We take every modest opportunity to remind DTES Residents of our Right to quality food. We use the offering of food to reflect back upon our neighbours their inherent dignity, deservedness and welcome within the DTES NH. (Right To Food Zine, 2016) Food, in its production, its consumption, and its associated meanings, is clearly central to sustenance for the DTES NH, as it is for all of us. What their food philosophy makes clear, furthermore, is that food is also fundamentally political. This chapter explores food production and, specifically, urban agriculture (UA) as a set of fundamentally political practices, both in terms of their role in neoliberal governance and ‘sustainability’ policy-making, and also as objects of contestation. We provide a brief overview of UA with a focus on the changing nature of urban food production in the global North, then engage with UA’s role in supporting food security, its contributions to environmental and social sustainability, as well as its entanglement in processes of gentrification. In particular, we use case studies from Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia to highlight the contentious nature of UA in cities that explicitly frame their policy-making in terms of sustainability, resilience, and ‘greenness’. While the practice of UA, which we broadly define as the production of food in cities, is as old as urbanization itself (Lawson, 2005), it has enjoyed a striking resurgence in recent years in the global North. This has been due in part to widespread assertions of its transformative contributions to food security and urban sustainability. Yet, the distribution of UA is socio- spatially uneven, benefiting some and excluding others. Therefore we ask, how do these differential – and inequitable – patterns both arise from and contribute to the fundamental tensions between economic growth, environmental regulation, and social equity that define sustainability? And how do municipal policies mediate these processes? Can and do these UA a Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning, Portland State University, [email protected] b Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, [email protected] c Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, [email protected] PRE-PRINT VERSION – please do not cite or circulate without authors’ permission McClintock, Miewald & McCann – Politics of Urban Agriculture policies open new spaces for more equitable models of sustainability? We will detail the role that both municipal policies and activist politics have played in shaping where and for whom UA is integrated into the urban landscape. In turn, we ask whether spaces of food production are part of a right to the city and if they can produce alternative visions of urban life and economic relationships. Our aim is to problematise the often-uncritical celebration of UA, highlight spaces of conflict within this growing movement and, at the same time, emphasize the social, health, and environmental benefits of urban food production. Approaching Urban Agriculture Widely hailed as a key component of urban sustainability, and taking a prominent place in municipal planning efforts, UA is fast becoming entangled in the contradictions of sustainable urbanism in the global North and is developing new forms and functions in the neoliberal city. New gardens are cropping up at a furious pace in a variety of types: residential gardens, community or allotment gardens, organizational gardens working for ‘food justice’ in so-called ‘food deserts’ (low-income areas with limited access to fresh produce), and market gardens and larger-scale urban farms that provide restaurants and residents with ‘ultra-local’ produce. At the same time, UA is coming under scrutiny by community activists questioning who it is actually serving, raising concerns that this new wave of UA primarily caters and appeals to the affluent and opens the door to predominantly white gentrifiers (Crouch, 2012; Markham, 2014). In response, some UA advocates are organizing against gentrification and expanding their focus to broader struggles for social justice (Phat Beets Produce, 2013; SFUAA, 2013). Some are engaging in policy-making, bringing equity concerns to the fore. UA has, then, become a key site of political contestation over urban sustainability. It has become both a driver of and reaction to on-going neoliberal urban transformations. Early scholarship on UA tended to emphasize either its benefits or shortcomings, leading to a dichotomizing perspective on the practice as either radical or neoliberal. But these benefits and shortcomings actually co-exist as a function of UA's diverse motivations and forms (McClintock, 2014). Often manifest at different scales, such contradictions cannot be fully understood without treating UA as a process operating within broader contradictory tensions of the ‘uneven development’ of the city, i.e., how flows of capital shape the city differentially for the benefit of on-going accumulation of capital, regardless of impacts on urban residents (Smith, 2008). This analytical lens brings into focus the relationship between political economic cycles of disinvestment and reinvestment (Hackworth, 2007; Harvey, 1989) and UA’s emergence as a socio-spatial phenomenon that both reproduces and contests capitalist urbanization (McClintock, 2014; Sbicca, 2014). Critical perspectives on urban agriculture Urban agriculture’s renaissance over the past decade has been accompanied by a groundswell of new UA organizations, projects, media attention, and scholarship. Scholars have documented the multiple attributes of UA, including its provision of a suite of environmental and social benefits. These include: enhancing biodiversity, managing stormwater infiltration, improving nutritional and mental health; fostering community interactions and cohesion; mitigating urban food insecurity; and serving as an ethical alternative – albeit limited in scale – to the dominant industrial agri-food system (Barthel et al., 2015; Draper and Freedman, 2010; Taylor and Lovell, 2014). 2 McClintock, Miewald & McCann – Politics of Urban Agriculture Yet, critical food scholars in geography, sociology, and anthropology have increasingly challenged UA’s progressive potential on several grounds. One line of critique sheds light on how UA activists are inadvertently complicit in neoliberal restructuring, despite their radical intentions. Drawing on agrarian political economy, scholars demonstrate how alternative food networks, including UA and other “interstitial food spaces” (Galt et al., 2014), arise from political economic restructuring (Jarosz, 2008). Some of these networks ultimately subsidize capital by shifting a portion of the responsibility for social reproduction onto volunteer-run groups, such as those organizing UA projects, since they replace services once provided by the welfare state (Allen and Guthman, 2006; Rosol, 2010). Further, many UA efforts ultimately instil a ‘neoliberal governmentality’ that encourages both personal responsibility for coping with economic restructuring, and market-based consumption-oriented approaches to food politics over collective action (Drake, 2014; Pudup, 2008; Weissman, 2015). A second relevant line of critique challenges ‘the local’ as a normative scale of intervention, and warns against reducing food justice to a spatial problem that can be easily ameliorated by constructing a garden or grocery store in a food desert (Shannon, 2014). Falling into this ‘local trap’ prevents practitioners from addressing macro-scale structures mediating food access (Born and Purcell, 2006), and the historical processes and contingencies that mediate access in particular neighbourhoods (Bedore, 2013; McClintock, 2011). Some scholars have therefore advocated for a more ‘reflexive localism’ (DuPuis and Goodman, 2005; Levkoe, 2011) that situates alternative food efforts within broader food systems and political economic contexts. Finally, a third relevant critique draws on critical race theory to argue that alternative food networks (including UA) are often constructed as ‘white spaces’, where “bringing good food to others” (Guthman, 2009) re-inscribes paternalistic, colonial patterns of oppression of people of colour. Disproportionate funding of white-led UA programs further fuels this trend (Reynolds and Cohen, 2016). Frequently, the motivations of well-meaning UA advocates who pursue work in communities with limited access to healthy food do not correspond to the expressed needs of community members themselves (Lyson, 2014; Ramírez, 2015; Slocum, 2007). Some scholars parallel this critique by applying the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ to urban contexts in North America. Food sovereignty not only underscores resistance to the hegemony of the global agri- food
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